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Types of Lawyers #2: The Partner Who Talks Too Fast

Associates working in large law firms will immediately recognize the partner-who-talks-too-fast. From somewhere outside your door, he barks a command to meet him in his office. It doesn’t matter that you were about to leave for lunch. When you arrive with a notebook, he tells you to have a seat. He has something to say about the Smithkin matter. In fact, here’s what he’s thinking: He wants you to write a letter to the opposing counsel. It concerns something very important--critically important--about the upcoming expert disclosures.

So far, you’ve understood everything he’s said. But it’s only at this point that the partner-who-talks-too-fast begins to show his true colors. He clears his throat, shakes his head, closes his eyes. Then without taking a single breath, he describes to you, in complete sentences but without a single pause, everything that he wants you to write in the letter, which if you took it down verbatim would fill most of a single-spaced page. You, however, are only able to get the first line, which goes something like this: “Dear Mr. Aspin: I think it is appropriate that we meet at a mutually-agreeable time to discuss the deadlines for disclosing our respective liability and damage experts.” This much of the letter you are able to capture in your mind, in addition to a few other random, disconnected passages; by the time you set these passages down on paper, however, the partner-who-talks-too-fast has already concluded the final paragraph.

Is the partner's fast-talking the necessary result of a monumentally important man's extremely crowded schedule? Or is it merely a case of showing off? Does it really matter? For you, the problem is much worse: the partner-who-talks-too-fast has just dismissed you from his office, and you have no idea what he did or didn’t say, only that it was critically important.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

I lucked out in my law firm days -- I worked with (1) a partner who stuttered; (2) another partner who was waaay too busy to even hold a conversation; and (3) a semi-retired partner who was always on safari somewhere in the pre-internet, pre-cellphone era.

I bet counsel in the White House are happy to have a President who never talks too fast. E-nun-c-i-a-shun beats ad-vice and pol-a-see anyday.

Dave!, I don't think the fast-talkin' partner would want to be recorded. Deniability.

I spent many years working for a partner who talked at a reasonable rate of speed, but after I wrote the letter and he reviewed it, he would say, "that's not what I wanted." When I would respond that he told me to be sure to include whatever he said he didn't want, he would answer, "well, if I said that at the time, I didn't mean it." BOING!!! No more of that for me. Ahhh ... leaving private practice is a blessing. Two months out after ten years, and I feel almost human again; or as human as a lawyer can ever hope to feel.

Assuming the associate has never worked on the file until now, and assuming he doesn't have a secretary to dump the little project on... Quick, grab the Smithkin file. Do a quick eyeball of the last three of four pleadings, and the last five or six letters and memoranda. Don't sit there and study every pleading, letter, note, and transcript. That's a luxury you can't afford -- it's lunchtime! Then, do a quick computer search of the firm's documents regarding expert disclosure. (As a young associate, you've already discovered the down and dirty way into the firm's massive catalog of every document from every case. Let's hope, anyway.) Within those results look for anything that discusses deadlines. At this point, if the associate is on the ball, he'll probably notice that in addition to deadlines, other parameters within the realm of experts are addressed. This might even jar a few memories from fast-talking-partner's recent directive. Quick, slap some of that language into a letter conformed to fit the Smithkin case; address it to Mr. Aspin; double space it; print it out; mark it "draft;" and quickly barrel your way back down to Mr. Partner's office. Don't worry about the work being wrong. Even if it's right, it'll probably be wrong. Just get in and out. Learn. And go forth in confidence.